So we see this photographic image of this mud brick-looking house in the ruin.

It's, you know, it looks a little, it's in shambles.

These are the ruins of the house that my mother grew up in.

That's the artist Sheda Soleimani.

Recently, I joined her at the Denny Gallery in Tribeca, New York, where we could look at her art together.

Her newest work is art about her parents' escape from Iran in the 1980s. It's actually a very collaborative practice. So, you know, I'll be like, oh, I remember the story you told me, and this is what I'm thinking of putting into the set, or this is what I'm putting in the background, and I'll describe it to him, and I'll be like, oh, this sounds good, except you left out this detail, and you should add this because it's a very important element. Sheda is talking me through this series, which we featured recently in the photography special of the FT Weekend magazine. It's called Ghost Writer, and the story it's telling is a difficult one.

As an opponent of the Iranian Revolution, Sheda's father spent several years in hiding, and her mother spent over a year imprisoned in solitary confinement. The project's name comes from the

early 2000s. Her dad noticed that ghostwritten immigrant stories were having a

moment in American culture. I remember my dad was like really excited about that at the moment and was

like, Sheda, Papa, we should find a ghostwriter to write a story about our life. And I knew that

he would never do it. And lo and behold, he never did. And so I remember calling them and asking them after a lot of thought,

is it okay if I go straight your story in photographs?

And they said yes.

And they said, under one condition, our faces remain anonymous.

And I said, absolutely, you know, thinking about also how I experience

and think about the medium of photography, the faces aren't

important to me. People don't need to see faces to understand, like, you know, the trauma

that they've experienced or their pain or their stories. Shado was born and grew up in the U.S.

years after her parents escaped. She's 33, and until now, she's been making very political work.

A lot of it is about how the Middle East is represented in Western media.

But now she's finally telling this very personal story about how her parents left Iran.

And the best, sort of most comfortable way that she's found to do that is to work with her parents.

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